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The price of cryptocurrencies may be steadily going down the tubes, but true believers are still hanging on to the blockchain dream. Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, is still all in. After buying BitTorrent for $150 million this summer, he now says that he’s investing $100 million to build video games on the blockchain.…
A Microsoft exploit made public last year after being pinched from the National Security Agency has now been used by hackers to compromise more than 45,000 internet routers, according to researchers. Cloud service provider and content delivery network Akamai said in a blog post Thursday that the tens of thousands of routers had been compromised…
The past year has seen its fair share of largely indistinguishable cryptocurrency scams. Think of a noun. [Noun]Coin and its founders were probably charged with fraud in the past 16 months. Most of these boneheaded grifts bleed together into one long, libertarian migraine—but only one of them can claim to have cost DJ Khaled and…
Amnesty International on Thursday said it had submitted a formal request to Israeli authorities two weeks ago asking that the export license of a Herzliya-based hacking firm be revoked over reported efforts to sell Saudi Arabia sophisticated surveillance software. The Israeli Defense Ministry reportedly declined the request, prompting Amnesty to consider legal action instead. In…
The year is winding down, and it’s very unlikely Microsoft will announce another major product, so naturally, we need to look forward to 2019 and beyond. Brad Sams of Thurrot has plenty of delectable rumors in his new book Beneath a Surface. Some of his claims about Microsoft’s product roadmap reinforce things we’ve heard before,…
Late in July, lawmakers sent a letter seeking details on Rekognition, Amazon’s in-house facial recognition software. Amazon wrote back, blandly, in August, but according to this increasingly impatient group of congresspeople, the company “has failed to provide sufficient answers.” The initial inquiry was timed around a damaging ACLU report that found Rekognition—software the company has…
Without the internet instantly dispersing images to millions of people, it was probably a lot easier to keep video game prototypes under wraps in the ‘80s. Just a handful of photos backed up rumors about the possible existence of a miniature version of the ill-fated Vectrex console, but it’s a rumor no more now that…
In April, Mark Zuckerberg told a congressional hearing, “I can’t be clearer on this topic: We don’t sell data.” But just because Facebook doesn’t currently sell data, it doesn’t mean they didn’t actively mull it over. Improperly redacted court documents from February 2017 show that Facebook explored charging companies for access to user data. The…
Security researchers have issued a warning that two pieces of support software for Sennheiser headphones contain a severe vulnerability that leaves systems open to man-in-the-middle attacks. But Sennheiser has a fix. In July, researchers from Secorvo found that the HeadSetup and HeadSetup Pro software was configured in a way that makes it incredibly simple for…
While the jury is still out on how practical bendy phone screens will be, the tech behind them is still one of the most lucrative trade secrets in the industry. So it probably doesn’t come as a surprise to hear that the CEO of a Samsung supplier and eight employees have been charged by South…
‘Tis the season and Google is feeling generous. Today it rolled out a bunch of new Google Assistant features, including improvements nifty to-do list functionality and a new feature that encourages you to be polite to your inanimate, question-answering bot. Though the features are packaged as a “surviving the holidays” toolkit, in general, they’re more…
Bad news for those of you with small hands or small pockets (or both): It looks like phones are staying big for the foreseeable future. But owning a handset with a big screen doesn’t mean you can’t operate it with just one hand if you need to—these are the software tricks and apps you need…
The American Civil Liberties Union wants to know how and why, exactly, a joint federal-state task force tracking the MS-13 gang tried to order social giant Facebook to build a backdoor into its Messenger app for surveillance purposes, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday. Earlier this year, news broke that the Department of Justice attempted to force…
Starbucks has reportedly decided to pull the plug on viewing explicit imagery in its stores following pressure from an anti-pornography activist group. Business Insider reported that the ubiquitous coffee house has committed to barring viewing porn in its stores after it was slammed by Donna Rice Hughes, the CEO of nonprofit Enough is Enough. Hughes…
Twitter has banned an account first registered in 2012 that purported to be the official English-language channel of Russian President Vladimir Putin but was, in fact, that someone else entirely. Archived versions show the account had over one million followers and had previously popped up in news reports. In a tweet from the platform’s official…
Microsoft has secured a $479 million-plus contract with the U.S. Army for Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) prototypes, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, expanding its relationship with the military and beating out a slew of other companies competing for the contract. According to the government proposal, the program is intended to “accelerate lethal defensive and offensive capabilities…
For people with visual impairment, Instagram just got a bit easier to use. The photo-heavy social media app announced two new features today that will let screen readers read photo descriptions generated through artificial intelligence as well as custom text written by users. The automatic alternative text relies on object recognition to generate a description.…
Just in time for the holiday shopping season, Dell has announced its online marketplace experienced a “cybersecurity incident” and the company has reset all Dell.com customers’ passwords. On Wednesday, Dell released a statement informing customers of the situation. It begins, “You may have read about a cybersecurity incident involving Dell.com.” In fact, we had not…
Hundreds of military service members reportedly got caught up in a sextortion scam run by prison inmates using cellphones, according to a release issued on Wednesday by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Military agents from multiple criminal investigation groups have served summons and issued warrants for arrests related to the scheme. According to the…
Urban Massage, a wellness app that connects users with professional massage therapists, reportedly left a database open to public access, potentially exposing sensitive user and employee data—including complaints alleging sexual misconduct by “dangerous” users alongside their names and other personal information. The ElasticSearch database, which was hosted by Google and has since been taken offline,…
